I'm less than 1km from a major cross country motorway. And a known length of cross country fibre optic cable, doing nowt aside from connecting a mere military installation that even Harry Wales has, apparently, been to.

 However, I'm reliant on a poor copper connection (that is dodgy to say the least), and hey, apparently we should be glad we can get any flavour of "broadband" connection this far from the exchange, which is in the next village. (4.2km crow flying which is hardly abnormal rural distance).

I don't call this broadband, I call it a joke.

8 years of campaigning- I couldn't get broadband then and I still can't now. Should we all stop because the incumbent telco is sweating its copper asset to suit its shareholders, not UK Plc (that's you and me)? Or because the government bods think we are 'alright Jack' oop ere in't north? Or because broadband doesn't matter half as much as some brown/green/blue/pink site in the Thames Valley?

What now? In 2006, what should we do to actually connect to the world at even a fraction of the speed of places we can't even put on the map?

I'll give you 10 secs, grab a globe - READY??? Go. Stick your finger on Hong Kong, Korea (the right bit), Estonia, Denmark, Sweden. Done it? 2 secs per country. Every single one of those countries has more broadband than you or I can even dream of. In the 2 secs you had to find them, they could have down/uploaded UP TO 2000 times more data than we can dream about over their broadband connection. Oh pooh. (Was that our price list just came in last and was discarded in a OJEU tender? Has our innovative idea missed the boat?)

Thinking back to 2002 to one of the first major Digital Dales events before we took them to London for ABC in July 2003, I remember a presentation about peripatetic broadband. A bus, satellite enabled, which would come into rural villages once a week and give us a decent connection for an hour to down and upload, before moving on to the next rural, disconnected area.

Oh, how we laughed.

I don't know whether to name him, but it was someone I had met through the Broadband Stakeholders Group at our regulatory group meetings in London in 2002. (That was when I could afford to go down each month, using the income of my own, rural, small company. Asking for the BSG to put in video conferencing or webstreaming facilities so I can attend virtually has, over the years, reaped no results. Fine body of representatives of the broadband industry they have proved to be. Not.) Anyway, I wanted to hear more about this proposal with others who were more down to earth and cynical. I found them in Hawes!

There was a slightly odd strand to this guy's presentation (think balloons) and it didn't go down well. For most of us, we were there to take things forward with broadband because our dial up connections were so appalling, but now I look back, the average trip to that event was actually over 150 miles so it wasn't just 'lost in the Dales' types, but people from Bristol, Sussex etc who were desperate to find out what the incumbent were going to do to take the nightmare of dial up away. Some bloke talking about broadband buses and balloons wasn't fitting into everyone's agenda. But right now.....4 years later. Hmmm. Was he ahead of his time?

However, none of us believed that we would ever need to be reliant on some form of satellite-enabled (pah), mobile library type bus letting us into our FTP servers and filesharing spaces once a week.

Oh, how bloody wrong we were, methinks.

Our final speaker was Mike Buhagiar of BT. Well known for his involvement in ACT NOW in Cornwall, (major publicly subsidised exchange enablement pilot that led the way for the rest of the RDAs to follow, a cynic might say), he was quite a coup for DD.

He was due to speak for 30-40 mins. It took 2.5 hours to extract him from the crossfire, and eventually the cleaners chucked us out into the car park where we continued for some time before he had to leave.

We got no answers as such as a group. I dread to think what Mike took back to BT, but a trip to comment on Exchange Activate in Wales followed, plus many ABC emails to Pierre et al and trips to London - which all got answers as I recall. I suspect they got many more.

But, in truth, we never got any of the solutions we sought, and the incumbent telco dinosaur with deep pockets (some sort of prehistoric kangaroo?) is only keeping up right now cos of those deep pockets and the fact that no-one else has the cojones to make a move.

Newcomers encouraged into the 'competitive market place' seem to have fallen into the honey-laden trap of voice call revenues. Well, mobile operators, weren't they? No-one seems to have explained the real basics of VoIP to them. How can you 'sell' a free voice app to your users? Where does it make money? THE MONEY STAYS IN THE POCKETS OF YOUR USERS.

So, in a moment of glory, it seems that £50m is being gambled, at least, on opening the digital divide, and accelerating major consumer dissatisfaction as the NOTSPOT problems worsen. Spot the incumbent? Oh, they'll be the ones with their heads down!

95% of the UK CANNOT access 8Mbps down, let alone a decent upload speed
and a mere 42% MIGHT get 4Mbps down

AND BT WHOLESALE are the company behind those products.

Don't forget the importance of two way traffic, interactivity, the consumer's need to share and upload. It ain't about Adsl. Give us SDSL. Or VDSL. Or fiber


So, back to the point. Let's make a choice. Let's pretend I have a 100Gb file to send. Should I fly to Hong Kong where it would take 13 mins to download and about an hour and a half to upload, or should I keep trying here? On a once a week bus that drops into my village.

On a good day (like I said, today isn't, the wind is coming off the hills and there's water in that ever-expensive copper pipe (up from £800 to £3k in just over 3 years, jeez, can I dig it up?!), it would take, hmmm, 9.5 days to download this 100Gb file, and a mere month to send it out to my neighbour over the "21CN" that the network operator is promising to offer.

Do I got to a peripatetic solution?Can I sit in the bus THaT long? I thought satellite was dead? After all, I nearly killed myself with the Aramiska debacle, don't tell me you guys have something to offer? - Avanti wouod like to offer 20Mbps by the end of the year as I write this.

But, really, what the hell can the BT Wholesale incumbent offer, the LLU providers don't want 'in' to rural areas, the fibre guys are crapping themselves in a corner, the retail ISPs are jumping on copper sweating bandwagons left, right and centre and desperately trying to recoup some of the 3G losses, but the customers?

Suffer in hell.

I think I'll either stick an Avanti or similar satellite solution on my truck, or fly to bloody Hong Kong. Cos at the end of the day, at least someone there is trying - 1Gbps, oh YES. Upload, download, who cares? It's my choice. I want to do it all day, all night, log on to my Internet banking, flog summat on Ebay, call my mate in Bolivia over VoIP, send a podcast to a new Internet Marketing community radio station, and upload tonight's bit of video of the first video conferencing rabbit to the awards' site for precocious pets.

But here I bloody can't. Cos BT owns the network and I live in a rural area, and NO-ONE in the metro elite gives a flying lump of pigeon poo about this. But we do.

So, look out for Maggie this summer, and if you need to reach the people, maybe advertising on her will do you more good than any of the multi-million ad campaigns that HAVE NOT GOT THE MESSAGE ACROSS. 

We sell broadband - for what it is, does and can do. Can you?

CANdo Awards - summer 2006. We award those who "do" for community, access and networks. Or you can win one for failing to take part. Bags of fudge awarded publicly to the major culprits who DON'T DO - is that you????

Lins